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The Forum > Article Comments > Charles Darwin, Abraham Lincoln and race > Comments

Charles Darwin, Abraham Lincoln and race : Comments

By Hiram Caton, published 3/4/2009

Neither Darwin nor Lincoln believed in racial equality: they believed humankind is structured in a hierarchy with Caucasians at the peak.

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DSM,

Whilst I probably was a bit extreme in calling HC a liar, the extract:

"Darwin surmised, by eugenic measures proposed by his cousin, Francis Galton. These he endorsed, but expressed his misgiving that they probably wouldn’t succeed"

Is difficult to interpret any other way than Darwin endorsed eugenics.

HC has in previously published articles tried to assert the same thing based on the tenuous lack of recorded evidence of Darwin repudiating a comment by a french translator of Darwin's work that he supported eugenics.

That there is recorded evidence that he did not support it has been convieniently neglected.

Whilst this might seem a storm in a tea cup, there is a trend amongst teachers of creationism and ID to assert that as Darwin and Hitler were proponents of eugenics, that evolution is an evil.

That is why I get irritated with otherwise reputable people peddling falsehoods.
Posted by Democritus, Tuesday, 7 April 2009 9:44:48 AM
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Democritus,

Yes, as Dan said, despite the difference in deconstructing the cited contentious paragraph, we both have landed in the same place. I certainly gained no impression that Darwin supported eugenics in the manner which you felt was inferred. You also, though from more evidence and research, share this pov.

However, I sympathise if this is part of a bone of contention in relation to Caton. I too have certain figures whom I have researched extensively and get not simply irritated but almost apopleptic when they are seemingly deliberately misrepresented!
Posted by Romany, Tuesday, 7 April 2009 4:03:57 PM
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Darwin made reference in his Descent of Man to the efficacy of what he called hybridism, that offspring of related 'races' or varieties were usually stronger, more disease-resistant and, in the case of humans, better-looking and stronger than either of their parents: he makes the point that Persian kings went out of their way to have children by women from non-Persian groups, and remarks somewhere (I can't actually find it but I'm sure it's there) on the practice of European aristocracy of marrying commoners in order to re-invigorate their genetic inheritance, specifically to avoid degeneration. The Byzantine emperors certainly practiced this principle enthusiastically. Darwin's notion of natural selection certainly did not focus on intra-group selection, in fact he seemed to suggest that that was a sure way for a species to become extinct. Hence the universal human practice of out-group marriage and Darwin cites many examples of this with approval.

My understanding is that pretty much everybody was a eugenicist in the twenties: Bolsheviks, H.G. Wells, Tittmuss, G.B. Shaw, various fascists and racists, the US government, all seeking some version or other of 'The New Man' (which all, regrettably, involved the extirpation of 'The Old Man' in the quest for a Utopia). And the first International Eugenics Conference wasn't held in the late nineteenth century, or even in the 1910s or 1920s, but in Hawai'i in 1937. So such racism is a much later, more prevalent and much more recent phenomenon than is usually supposed.
Posted by Loudmouth, Wednesday, 8 April 2009 11:51:31 AM
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